A literary blog for all seasons.

January 2010

01/29/2010

"The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left," said Don DeLillo in his book "Mao II," likely thinking of J.D. Salinger. We will know at some point whether Salinger really withheld his art, or if there are new stories and books that he left us.

For now, we have a handful of works that cast a huge shadow. "The Catcher in the Rye," which gave American literature a character and voice that stand with "Huckleberry Finn" and one or two others. The great, groundbreaking "Nine Stories," including one of the top American stories, "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor." The Glass family saga, highlighted by the heartbreaking story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Franny and Zoey." What American male reading the latter didn't fall in love with Franny? Who else had such a perfect gift for dialect as to have a character say "Jeet jet?" (Did you eat yet?)

01/28/2010

Just as I was marshaling my thoughts on the death of Louis Auchincloss, I saw the news that Howard Zinn had also died. Auchincloss, the chronicler of New York's upper classes, and Zinn, the firebrand stone-turner of an alternative "people's history" of the United States, represent two strands of American writing, with their characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

I don't remember ever finishing an Auchincloss novel: his world of white-shoe lawyers in wood-paneled offices and exclusive clubs was too claustrophic, their language too opaque and coded. Yet, I enjoyed his autobiography, essays and reviews. His New York Times obituary indicates that while he is associated with "old money," his family was not of the oldest old money. While fondly recalling his grandmother's association with Edith Wharton, his family came to wealth and influence later than those original families that populate Wharton's work. He understood these class distinctions, the difference between Yale and Harvard and Princeton men, and their clubs and associations and marriages.

My first appreciation of Auchincloss came from an essay by Gore Vidal, who belongs to the same family, along with Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Auchincloss' delineations of the quiet and mysterious workings of power and money among the WASP upper classes who used to rule America made his work appear old-fashioned, like that of Victorian writers like Thackery. He continued working as a Wall Street attorney while writing his many novels, and was a familiar figure in New York high-society circles. With his death, I feel regret at the passing of his type of cultivated "gentleman."

Zinn, with his "People's History of the United States" sought to give voice to those outside of Auchincloss' class. He sought to show how those of Auchincloss' mileu manipulated and controlled history, to the detriment of the working classes and the primitive cultures of the world. His work was among those that I read in my wide-eyed youth, when writers like him showed me a different reality from the pleasing stories of American goodness and progress with which I had grown up.

But, as time went on, I learned to mistrust much of Zinn's viewpoint. His once startling insights began to appear banal and shrill. The work of him and other writers, like Noam Chomsky, who gave an alternative to the mainstream American views were valuable counterforces, yet they had their own prejudices and simplifications. Over the years, I turned more and more impatient and skeptical of Zinn's writing. Yet, I valued his contributions to America's intellectual and cultural currents.

Like Auchincloss, Zinn is a member of a vanishing generation. Along with Norman Mailer, Vidal, Chomsky, Hunter S. Thompson, I.F. Stone and other American radicals, he exposed the hypocrises and misdeeds behind the facade of American "innocence." The old literary culture, now dying, allowed their voices to flourish. The Internet has allowed many would-be cultural commentators and critics to emerge, but this burgeoning chorus lacks the skill, talent, knowledge and analytical ability that made those writers so vital.

01/25/2010

I picked up the winter 2009 issue of the Paris Review, mainly for the "Art of Memoir" interview with Mary Karr. I've been reading the Paris Review for years, mainly for those interviews with an impressive array of writers. As Gore Vidal sniffed, the interviews are "book chat," almost book porn with their concentration on writing habits, rituals and the like, but I've always enjoyed them, even hunting down the early ones from the 1950s with figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I bought a back issue of the journal from the early '60s to acquire the Robert Lowell interview.

Karr's interview was amusing and informative, and I'll look forward to reading the "art of fiction" interview in the same issue with Ha Jin. The issue also includes stories by Aimee Bender and others, and poems by Robert Hass and the New York school James Schuyler, who seems to publish as much now as when he was alive.

Philip Gourevitch, who took over as Paris Review's editor after the death of founder George Plimpton, is leaving in April. Gourevitch has refreshed the journal's look, added more photography and the like, but to me, the journal lacks the zip and insouciant style it had under Plimpton, or did back in the late '60s, when I began reading it. The Paris Review is searching for a new editor, with Gourevitch deciding to concentrate on his writing. We hope the new editor revitalizes the edgy, experimental vigor that it had in its glory days.

When I was in college, I subscribed to Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and the Paris Review, perhaps the only student at LSU to do so. The quarterly arrival of the Paris Review in my mailbox gave me a shiver of excitement, a thrilling glimpse of the sophisiticated world of art and literature. I particularly remember the puzzling but stimulating stories of Harry Mathews, "The Sinking of Odradek Stadium."

Funny, I was familiar with Plimpton from my high school days, when I had read my father's Book of the Month Club edition of "Paper Lion," Plimpton's account of attempting to play quarterback for the Detroit Lions. The world of pro football, especially the comic defensive lineman Alex Karras, was familiar to me from my devouring of Sports Illustrated and Sport magazines, as well as watching the Packers, Lions, Bears, Steelers and Cardinals and the upstart AFL on Sunday afternoons. Little did I know that the same Plimpton would be the purveyor of such an exotic blend of stories, poems and interviews.

Speaking of the Village Voice, does anyone else remember a feminist/lesbian writer named Jill Johnston? She believed that capital letters and punctuation were weapons of the male ruling hiearachy, so refused to use either. Her stories in the Village Voice were long strips of uncapitalized words strung together, nearly impossible to read. Yet, she, and other Voice writers, gave me a sense of the gritty, exciting, intellectually and artistically vibrant world of New York City.

01/21/2010

I'm intrigued by the literary journal The Believer, rarely enough, however, to buy a copy. I like The Believer's big-page format, funky neo-underground comix art, and feisty, Internet-age tone. Yet the magazine of Heidi Julavits, Ed Park and Vendela Vida (married to the ultra cool Dave Eggers) is not quite on my wavelength, probably because my cutting edge has developed a few chinks.

The January Believer drew my purchase, though, with a essay on the metafiction master Gilbert Sorrentino. John Domini's "Catharsis in Bebop" acutely analyzed Sorrentino's nobel efforts to subvert fictional conventions, while maintaining narrative interest. However, Sorrentino was not quite as engaging to readers as Domini maintains. His authorial instrusions, narrrative detours and meta-textual jokes could grow tiresome. Sorrentino the idea was often more enticing than Sorrentino the actual writer. Still, as Domini demonstrates, Sorrentino is worth reading, a central experimental, avant garde writer.

Also captivating is Sarah Weinman's rediscovery of a writer I'd never heard of, Don Carpenter, a close friend of Richard Brautigan. Weinman's "Fridays at Enrico's" evokes an era of West Coast writing that broke new ground with its hardcore realism. Carpenter was one of that surprisingly large cast of authors known as "writer's writers," whose debut novel "Hard Rain Falling" has been republished by the New York Review of Books' forgotten masterpieces series.

Carpenter, Brautigan and other writers met weekly in the 1960s at Enrico's, a restaurant in San Francisco's North Beach. Weinman's look back on those meetings gives a memorable snapshot of Brautigan. Carpenter, also a movie and TV writer as well as a novelist, apparently based his unpublished and perhaps unfinished last book, "Fridays at Enrico's" on those meetings. Brautigan's suicide hit Carpenter hard, and, in poor health, he followed his friend's example. After reading the piece, I'll try to hunt down Carpenter's books.

I didn't find the rest of the magazine as appealing. Equally disappointing were conversations between Aleksandar Hemon and Colum McCann and Francis Ford Coppola and Ruth Reichl. Several of the pieces I found more puzzling than enlightening. A few of these were apparently humorous, but I could not quite get the joke. The problem with these "I guess I just don't understand the secret handshake" articles wasn't necessarily generational; I was left flat by Greil Marcus' "Real Life Rock Top 10, a Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects," and I've been reading him since his first appearances in Rolling Stone 30 or 40 years ago.

01/18/2010

Out of the blur of events from the New Yorker festival I attended several years ago, Katha Pollitt's reading of, I believe, "Sept. 1, 1939," during a W.H. Auden gathering stands out. Pollitt's hushed, understated and calm reading captured the Auden essence.

I'd long admired Pollitt's Nation columns, which I continue to enjoy. Writing about politics and social issues from a leftist, feminist perspective, she displays reason, knowledge, common-sense, and humor. I've also liked coming across her personal essays. So, I was drawn to her 2009 poetry collection, "The Mind-Body Problem."

My interest paid off: I found her poems wise, engaging, poignant and readable. Among the pleasures of the work was her masterful use of meter and rhyme. Although her Nation columns are well-constructed, following the classic rules of composition, I'd expected her poems to be looser, predominantly free verse. Instead, she displayed strong technical control, her blank verse diction reminisicent of James Merrill.

Mainly set in New York City, the poems give an authentic view of the great city, capturing well the shadowy, crepescular atmosphere and sense of dislocation and loneliness. She also shows the ethnic flavor of the city, especially Jewish.

Another unexpected pleasure of the work: a section of poems "After the Bible." Her take on biblical stories showed unexpected religious insight, inspiring me to revisit the Old and New Testament, which played so large a part in my childhood. I'd assumed that she would be an athiest with no interest whatsoever in the Bible, but she obviously has a deeply personal and scholarly attachment to it.

Like any poet, she makes some wrong turns: in a poem called "Night Subway," a meditation on people encountered traveling through the city, she jarringly brings in Xerxes, the Persian general who fought the ancient Greeks. "How not think of Xerxes, how he reviewed his troops/and wept to think that of all those thousands of men/in their brilliant armor, their spearpoints bright in the sun/no one would be alive in a hundred years?" She's making a point of the transitory nature of life, that the people on the subway and in the city won't be around in a hundred years either, but the example of Xerxes on the eve of battle with the Greeks doesn't match the mood/subject of the rest of the poem.

Other disparate comparisons work better. Her last poem, "Wisdom of the Desert Fathers," aptly connects the early Christians with contemporary "bachelor uncles, washing the car on Sundays." Among many strong poems, my favorite is "A Chinese Bowl," in which the adult poet looks back on her girlhood as the daughter of a leftist attorney.

I had not been that familiar with Pollitt's poetry before reading "The Mind-Body Problem." The book, published by Random House, shows that her poetry is as vital and essential as her political and social commentary.

01/15/2010

Raymond Carver miraculously shook up American literature in the early 1970s, arriving with a new voice and freshly imagined characters who opened a window into struggling, working class lives not previously examined in mainstream fiction, although pulp writers of the 1930s and later covered much of the same ground.

I recall discovering Carver, reading one of his first nationally distributed stories in Esquire, or perhaps even coming across his first story collection. He changed my consciousness like a slap in the face, or a splash of cold water. Like many readers, I saw his work as a sharp turn in writing, a change from the stylized, academic, New York-intellectual stories so prevalent in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and other magazines. After that initial shock, I avidly devoured new appearances of his work.

Carol Sklenicka's "Raymond Carver, A Writers Life," reveals that his rise was remarkable. The first part of the biography is tough slogging: an endless litany of Carver's family's moves from one hardscrabble Northwestern sawmill town to the other. With Carver's uncanny emergence upon the literary scene, the book turns interesting.

The book tells a familiar story: alcoholic writer haunted by his talent, self-loathing and desperate to create, damaging his family and friends, falling further and further into drinking, nearly killing himself, finally hittting bottom, turning sober and finding redemption. When I read reviews about Sklenicka's book, I was reluctant to rewind the tale. Yet, when I found the book available at the library, I plunged in once more.

Carver stumbled into writing, luckily taking a course from the novelist and fiction theorist John Gardner at Chico State in California. This was the dawn of the MFA-po biz era, and Carver was one of its first successes. Now, with the proliferation of MFA programs and writing courses producing an endless stream of writing hopefuls, a rise like Carver's would likely be more daunting. Despite struggles with poverty, bad luck and his own low "self-esteem," he devoted himself to his writing with admirable grit, and began publishing poems and stories in small magazines.

Unlike many young writers, he was already a husband and father, having married his high school sweetheart, Maryann Burk. While pushing ahead with his writing, Carver and his wife supported themselves with a series of menial jobs. Maryann also had strong ambitions; one of the admirable parts of the book is her perseverance to gain an education and enter different careers, including years as a respected high school teacher.

Despite the problems, Carver found opportunities for himself that many aspiring writers would envy. He wrangled a place at the famed Iowa writing program, which would give him an anchor for years. However, he failed to take full advantage of his chance; leaving after a year without a degree. He never received an MFA, although he later used his stellar reputation to land teaching jobs, finally landing up at the prestigious Syracuse. In one of the several instances in the book in which the Iowa program comes off badly, Carver's teachers and fellow students fail to recognize his promise in his initial stint, and he slinks back off to California for more dead-end jobs. However, he does eventually find a decent job as a technical writer/editor. For years, he and his family emerge into middle class comfort, then sink back into poverty. Hounded by creditors, he and MaryAnn declare bankruptcy more than once.

Carver persevered, finding places for his poems and stories and meeting fellow writers. At last he meets Gordon Lish, the editor with the reputation for totally reshaping Carver's work and making some of his most noted stories. The book details how Lish rewrote and severely cut "Neighbors," which appeared in Esquire in June 1971, his first natioinal publication, though he had been publishing in small magazines since 1959. Lish also reworked stories collected in Carver's groundbreaking book "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"

Sklenicka barely touches upon the controvesy about whether Carver was mainly Lish's creation. The book leaves the impression that Lish's influence has been overstated, although it shows how extensive his editing was in stories celebrated as milestones of the "new minimalism" movement . Rather than the surehanded, unerring "Captain Fiction," Lish comes off as a destructive, off-base charlatan. One of these days, I'll look at the Book of America collection that reprints Carver's work as he first wrote it, without Lish's changes. Sklenicka strongly supports the case that Carver was an accomplished writer without Lish's assistance. However, Lish played a dominant role in those first stories that so stunned me, and I wonder if they would have had such an effect without Lish's changes. My initial judgment is that Carver would have had a worthy, but smaller, career without Lish. Lish, with his prominent position in the American literary establishment, turned Carver into the towering figure he became.

In the biography, Carver comes off as a docile, passive victim, accepting Lish's changes with ineffectual protest. Perhaps in frustration over the changes, although Sklenicka never overtly makes the connection, Carver fell further into alcoholism, along with his wife. I felt sorry for the couple's two children, who had to make do for themselves with little parenting.

As Carver's writing productivity fell off, he still made the rounds of the country's writing hangouts. He had a stint teaching at Iowa, and often returned to Iowa City. A harrowing, albeit grimly amusing, segment details Carver's woeful friendship with another famed literary drunk, John Cheever. The two alky short story specialists (of course, Cheever completed several novels, unlike Carver) mainly tried to outdrink each other rather than make much effort to help their students.

Every morning, Carver drove Cheever to the liquor store, where Cheever would desperately wait for the place to open so that he could plunge into vodka obliteration for another day. Again, the sad escapades of these two doesn't do much for the Iowa program's reputation. It comes off as a place more devoted to parties, drinking and illicit sex than writing.

Another dismally amusing anecdote is of the time Carver sponsors Charles Bukowski for a reading at a California university. Both men lurch through the evening on streams of alcohol and boorish behavior.

Carver's escapades were legendary in literary circles. As his drinking increased and his family collapsed, he kept getting ill-fated teaching assignments and writing conference gigs. "The bad Ray" stories are only touched upon.

At last, Carver through a long and harrowing process finds sobriety, meets the poet and essayist Tess Gallagher, and lives his last years in tranquillity and renewed creativity. He continued his friendship with writers like Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Sadly, he enjoyed only a few years of contentment; dying of cancer at age 50. A few years later, Ford wrote a memorable essay on Carver, in which his growth into a saintly figure is detailed.

After those first trudging chapters, Sklenicka's writing gains momentum. Even at her best, though, narrrative incoherence mars the book. Likely because of editing cuts, transitions are weakly handled: I often had a feeling of disclocation at finding Carver in a new place, without quite knowing how he had arrived there. On the whole, though, the book is a valuable first signicant biography, giving perspective and shape to Carver's rise to prominence.

One interesting sidelight to the book: I noticed a recent letter in the Sunday New York Times Book Review from Maryanne Burk Carver, commenting upon a review of the biography. She made tremendous sacrifices for Carver's career, and carries on, more than 20 years after his death.

01/12/2010

I've seen two references recently to Richard Brautigan, a central writer of West Coast counterculture literature of the 1960s and '70s. Are these the first signs of a Brautigan revival?

In my college days, I was captivated by Brautigan's work, the best known of which is the novel "Trout Fishing in America." His books made me feel part of the cool, back-to-the-land, peaceful, easy feeling movement of the time. Its anthems, sung by Jackson Brown, Tim Buckley, the Byrds, Joni Mitchell, etc., came flowing out of Laurel Canyon, spreading good vibes across this great land, so groovy that the nation elected Richard Nixon to bring us back to our senses.

I cannot remember much about Brautigan's work except for hazy impressions of sun-lit meadows and mining communities beside rock-strewn mountain streams. One phrase has stuck with me: "the saddest lovemaking this side of the cross." Pretty telling for a haunted man prone to mental breakdowns who later killed himself at age 49. Well, I hope some kid today stumbles across Brautigan's work and enjoys it as much as I did.

In those days, I also fell into a Hermann Hesse jag. Nor can I remember much of anything of those books, except for a blur of dreamy German forests, fog-enveloped medieval cities and professor wisemen-shamans with creepy secret knowledge. I also remember a lot of ecstatic, magical love scenes.

Also, Hesse's novel "Stephenwolf" gave its name to the bad-boy rock band who contributed such themes to our brave new youth culture as "Born to Be Wild."

01/08/2010

Tin House continues its good work in its new issue (Volume 11, No. 2) with Cassandra Cleghorn's interview of Roy Blount Jr., the incarnation of Samuel Johnson or perhaps H.L. Mencken. Like those giants, Blount happily writes for money in a variety of genres while adhering to the most exacting standards. Also like them, he's a serious student of the English language, while maintaining a non-specialist's joy of discovery. In the interview, he calls it "shade-tree etymology."

...In talking with Cleghorn, a poet and a senior instructor at Williams College, Blount revisits his excellent book on English usage and words, "Alphabet Juice." He shows his pride at his versatility by mentioning that he's written about Yogi Berra for Sports Illustrated, Pauline Kael for the Atlantic, and Ray Charles for the Oxford American. The wide-ranging, at times elliptical, interview gives an intriguing portrait of a restless, probing, creative mind.

...I'm looking forward to perusing the rest of the magazine, which also has a story by the fine writer Antonya Nelson, poetry by D. Nurske and Dorianne Laux, an essay on Afghanistan by the excellent Ana Menendez, and a piece by Roxana Robinson on "Kentucky Bread."

...The Jan. 4 New Yorker included a strong short story by the Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan. The Jesuit priest's story, "Baptizing the Gun," has a predictable major plot twist, but gives a vivid picture of the chaotic energy of the teeming Nigerian capital, Lagos. The conflicts between Western technology and political philosophy and the city's tribal loyalties, engrained customs and primitive social conditions are etched with comic, poetic language and zany, wildly imaginative situations.

The story inspired me to repair to the local library and put a computer "hold" on Akpan's noted short story collection, "Say You're One of Them." The computer told me that out of roughly 10 copies of the book in the Atlanta-Fulton County library system, only one was available. That was an encouraging sign of broad readership of an important book: I wondered if that meant that it is being widely assigned in the city's high school English classes. I was also interested to see that the one copy available was at the Carver Homes branch, serving what was once one of Atlanta's most desperate housing projects, although a major effort has been made in recent years to alleviate conditions there. I would think that residents of the community would find much of interest in Akpan's work, and I hoped that the book's availability there wasn't a sign that it is being neglected there. No matter what, I punched in my library card number, punched the send button, and placed the hold. I will look forward to the library's friendly computerized voice mail message telling me the book is ready for me to pick up.

...Roy Blount, in the Tin House interview, cites English writer Alan Furst's comment that he wanted to write in "traslator's English," as if it had been translated from another language. Blount says this means that it can, in turn, be translated readily into other languages. At first, I didn't know quite what to make of this, but then thought of the work of Akpan and the Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, both of whom use English as their primary language and studied in American writing programs. Their English retains the exotic flavor of their native cultures, giving their works the flexiblity and color of what might be thought of as "translator's English." Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a second language, is one of the pioneer masters of that branch of the language.

...Speaking of Conrad, a look back at his works would expand understanding of the forces that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day. The stresses of colonialism conveyed by Conrad continue to influence developments like radical Islamism. Dostoyevsky would be another writer worth studying for insights into terrorists' psyches. In books like "The Devils," Dostoyevsky wrote about well-educated, indulged youngsters like Abdulmutallab being seduced by violent action in the service of extreme ideologies. What we know as terrorism had its first incarnation in Dostoyevsky's late 19th century Russia. His young intellectuals, caught between the forces of rapid development, feverish ideas and a primitive culture, turned to atheistic anarchy, the precursor of the Bolshevik revolution. But like radical Islam, the political ideology offered a messianic, narcotic, unambiguous solution to spiritual emptiness.

01/05/2010

My most recent post, in which I sought to explain my Southern heritage, neglected music, as a loyal reader and old friend pointed out. Actually, he said that "I forgot Elvis."

"Southern Bookman's" primary subject is literature, but music, especially Southern music, has played a major role in my life, and deeply influences my consciousness.

Elvis was one of my earliest musical icons. When Elvis first arrived on the national scene, I won a kindergarten talent contest by impersonating him. My mother drew sideburns with mascara, and I used an old tennis racket for my guitar as I tried to shake my hips and pelvis the way Elvis did as "Hound Dog" or "All Shook Up" spun on a record player.

"The King" didn't write many songs; yet his ability to give new life to old songs like Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" shows that he was a major musicologist. His voice, with major contributions from colleagues like Scotty Moore, brought a fresh new sound that shook the world. Elvis represents a Southern archetype, an adventuresome, reckless youth who leaves the country for the city, yet never loses his love for speed, danger and fun. He's also generous, fun-loving, kind, and soulful. The archtype returns often in Southern writing.

After Elvis, I discovered his progenitors, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rogers, the singing brakeman. Both were known for their songwriting as well as their performing. They took the South's oral tradition, covering story-telling as well as song, and spread it through the culture. Elvis' new sound didn't rise from a void; to me, Hank Williams' "Move It on Over" is the prototypical rock and roll song, with a beat that echoes in Bill Haley and the Comets and Buddy Holley and the Crickets. And Rogers, with his blue yodels, provided a twangy, r and b model.

They are closely allied to Southern black bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightning Hopkins. They too drew on the South's oral traditions to write haunting songs in which lyric and melody join to make an aesthetically powerful whole. While Hank Williams and Jimmie Rogers' words might show a bit more sophistication, the black bluesmen's music is more complicated and virtuosic. The white and black traditions are different streams, yet intertwin. Hank Williams was tutored by the black street musician Tee-tot, and one of the greatest white guitarists, Mother Maybelle Carter, also received lessons from a black player. Jimmie Rogers welcomed Louis Armstrong on his recordings. The blues, jazz, rock, rhythm and blues and bluegrass come from the same rural culture, cross-pollinated by big-city influences.